Nobel ideas, false hopes

Descending on Norway, entourage in tow, President Barack Obama accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on Thursday with oblivion enveloping him in the fashion of a cocoon. Outside, the air blew harder and colder; inside, nothing penetrated.

Obama began the month by announcing that he’d decided to send 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan. Arabs detected the irony that culminated with his appearance in Oslo City Hall. How, they wondered, can a fellow land a Nobel, and accept it with a straight face, while orchestrating wars on two fronts? Perturbed neither by this nor the seeming incongruity of his words and the moment, Obama said of American troops, “Some will kill. Some will be killed.” Well. Peace out.

Nearby, protesters gathered, some against war, others against climate change (a thing in which Obama steadfastly believes). The latter group, according to some reports, appeared to be gaining a numeric advantage, demonstrating that war and peace mix better than oil and water, especially if the guy doing the stirring is one so hip and tingly as America’s current commander-in-chief. Or so it all appears in the mind of that increasingly isolated crowd known as the intellectual elite.

Others are tiring of Obama’s act. Another wave of polls came out just before the onset of the president’s Nobel nirvana. His job approval rating among voters slipped to 46 percent. They don’t like health care reform and they don’t like the way he’s handling it. Republicans got a thump on the nose, too, but they’ve grown accustomed to swirling around the bottom of the bowl. Obama’s feet once hovered above the water. Now the river’s rising around him.

But Obama doesn’t know he’s all wet. Channeling Cicero and Augustine, or perhaps endeavoring to perfect them, the president turned his Nobel acceptance speech into a just war treatise, just the kind of talk his Nobel fans in their private thoughts likely hoped he’d avoid. “We can understand that there will be war and strive for peace,” he declared. “Inaction tears at our conscience and can lead to more costly intervention later.”

All of this is true, but the trouble with war is that it’s difficult to engage in it successfully without giving the enemy the feeling of being put upon, which is what Obama hopes to avoid in an Arab world generally inimical to the United States and the friend it has in Israel. Among the president’s patterns – reflected in his push for health care reform even as voters seek to push it away – is that he gives people gall to drink then wonders at their frowns.

His award is not the product of what he’s accomplished – which is piffle – but of a deeply cherished perception that somehow he can lift America and the world with it above the unseemliness of resisting deadly enemies. Having won political campaigns and peace prizes by force of personality, Obama now wants to win a war by killing kindly. It’s a Nobel idea but a foolish one. Inside the cocoon, it resonates. Beyond, it rings hollow.